Geoffrey Chaucer

The Ellesmere Chaucer Reproduced in Facsimile

Geoffrey Chaucer

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1911
Fol. CC25.77 [Chaucer]

Of the 82 extant manuscripts and fragments of the Canterbury Tales, the Ellesmere Chaucer (so-called because before its sale to the Huntington Library in California it belonged to a succession of earls of Ellesmere) contains the most authentic text and the most satisfactory arrangement of the tales. It is essentially the version on which most editions of Chaucer since 1868 have been based. It is also the most opulent manuscript, with gold leaf on most pages and, distinctively, with equestrian portraits of the 23 storytellers, and contains one of only two reliable likenesses of Chaucer. Shown here is the earliest of several facsimiles, in full-size reproduction. Later scholars have condemned it for infidelity to its source: it is cleaner than the original, a modern artist has retouched the portraits, only 71 pages have been reproduced in colour, and those colours do not accurately reflect the manuscript.

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

[London]: R. Pynson, [between June 1491 and 13 Nov. 1492]

William Caxton, England’s earliest printer, produced the first printed edition of The Canterbury Tales in about 1476-7. By the end of the fifteenth century, Caxton had issued a revised and illustrated edition of The Canterbury Tales (1483) and five other works by Chaucer. Both the other major English printers had also brought out The Canterbury Tales: Wynkyn de Worde (Caxton’s assistant and successor) in 1498 and, shown here, Richard Pynson, in 1492. Pynson’s edition is based on Caxton’s second edition. It contains 47 woodcut illustrations from 21 blocks, derived from Caxton’s and placed in the same position in the text. The red paragraph marks of this copy are in a fifteenth-century hand.

The Workes of Geffray Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer

London: T. Godfray, 1532
[S.L.] I [Chaucer - 1532] fol. (SFL)

This is the first collected edition of Chaucer’s works. Its editor, William Thynne (d. 1546) was motivated by his discovery of ‘many errours, falsities and deprauacions’ in earlier editions of Chaucer. His text is based on various manuscripts and printed versions, which he compared against each other. Thynne’s edition is notable for the first life of Chaucer and a genealogy, and for printing various Chaucerian works for the first time: The Romaunt of the Rose (shown), The Legend of Good Women, The Book of the Duchess, The Complaint unto Pity, Lak of Stedfastnesse, and A Treatise on the Astrolabe. Thynne also introduced poems by John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, Richard Roos and Robert Henryson into the Chaucer canon. He emended Chaucer’s language to restore forms which by the early sixteenth century had become archaic and classicized the spelling of proper names.

The Woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer; ed. by John Stow

London: J. Kingston for J. Wight, 1561
Bc.3 [Chaucer] fol SR

John Stow (1524/5-1605) is better known as an historian and the author of A Survey of London (1598) than for literary endeavours. His edition of Chaucer has been widely reviled, most notably by the eighteenth-century editor Thomas Tyrwhitt for adding a ‘heap of rubbish’. Yet it is significant as the edition through which Chaucer was known to many Elizabethan authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare. Over nine-tenths of Stow’s edition is a reprint of Thynne. The rest comprises chiefly spurious poems, and also Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. It is open here at Chaucer’s translation of Boethius.

The Workes of our Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer; ed. by Thomas Speght

London: A. Islip for G. Bishop, 1598
[D.-L.L.] Bc.3 [Chaucer] fol. SR

Thomas Speght (d. 1621) became interested in Chaucer as a student at Cambridge. His editions of Chaucer have been the most durable of any, their influence lasting until the late eighteenth century, and his extensive introductory biography of Chaucer (with material gathered partly by Stow) remaining the standard basis for accounts of Chaucer’s life until the 1840s. Speght’s contribution to Chaucer scholarship lies in his elaborate notes and introductory material, fuller than for any previous edition, new annotations, and in his introduction of a substantial glossary (about 2,000 words) as part of the editorial apparatus. Speght further adds two new poems, The Floure and the Leafe (see case 6), unchallenged until the nineteenth century, and The Isle of Ladies. Speght’s text owes much to Stow.

The Workes of our Ancient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer; ed. by Thomas Speght

London: G. Bishop, 1602
[D.-L.L.] Bc.3 [Chaucer] fol.

Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer takes account of criticisms made by Francis Thynne, William Thynne’s son, and departs more decisively from Stow than the 1598 edition had done. Corrections listed in the 1598 edition are here incorporated in the text. This edition contains the first printing of Chaucer’s ‘ABC’ (shown), and the non-Chaucerian ‘Jack Upland’. Minor changes include the distribution of the ‘arguments’ (i.e. summaries of works) to the head of the relevant tale or poem, the provision of marginal fists besides aphorisms, and the introduction of etymologies into the glossary.

The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer; ed. by John Urry

London: B. Lintot, 1721
[B.L.] fol. 1721 [Works]

John Urry’s edition of Chaucer, published nearly 150 years after the previous one, is the first collected edition to be issued in roman type. Urry frequently emended the text, mainly to make the verse conform to his sense of Chaucer’s metre. Critics have roundly condemned him for this, with later eighteenth-century editors calling his edition ‘the worst that is extant’ (Thomas Morell, 1736) and ‘by far the worst that was ever published’ (Thomas Tyrwhitt, 1775). More positively, Urry was the first editor since Thynne systematically to use manuscripts. His edition is the first to describe Chaucerian manuscripts, and the first to print the Middle English romances of Gamelyn and The Tale of Beryn, which Urry wrongly ascribes to Chaucer.

The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer; ed. by Thomas Tyrwhitt

London: T. Payne, 1775
YE C37K 775

In strong contrast to Urry, Thomas Tyrwhitt has been described as ‘the founder of modern Chaucer editing’ (B.A. Windeatt) and his edition greeted as ‘the best edited English Classic that ever has appeared’ (Gentleman’s Magazine). Respecting manuscripts as the best evidence of what Chaucer wrote, Tyrwhitt chose the best available manuscript reading at all crux points. His modest-looking four-volume octavo is groundbreaking for establishing the order of the tales and the links between them much as in later editions, for assembling the first effective modern commentary, and for Tyrwhitt’s perception of Chaucer’s metrical regularity. The glossary, published with a biography of Chaucer as a fifth volume in 1778, consolidates a study of Chaucer’s language.

Fables Ancient and Modern

John Dryden

2nd edn
London: J. Tonson, 1713

John Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern, first published in 1700, includes modern English translations of three Canterbury Tales, ‘The Knight’s Tale’, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ and ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, as well an expanded description of the parson from the ‘General Prologue’ of the tales and ‘The Flower and the Leaf’. Eschewing some of the Canterbury Tales for licentiousness, Dryden chose these particular tales because they ‘savour[ed] nothing of immodesty’. Dryden’s Fables provided a landmark in Chaucer reception. In a lengthy preface, Dryden reiterated and gave authority to the fifteenth-century label of Chaucer as ‘the Father of English Poetry’ (and to the view that ‘From Chaucer the Purity of the English Tongue began’). Dryden praised Chaucer for portraying accurately life around him, and saw The Canterbury Tales as his most important work because it was the most realistic.

Sphaera Mundi

Joannes de Sacro Bosco

Venice: Ottaviano Scotto, 1490
Incunabula 35

Joannes de Sacro Bosco’s Sphaera Mundi – a comprehensive account of the earth as a sphere in the centre of the universe, written in about 1220 – was the most popular geography and cosmology of the Middle Ages. Chaucer drew upon it alongside his main source, Messahala’s Compositio et Operatio Astrolabii, for his Treatise of the Astrolabe. Chaucer wrote his description of the basic medieval astronomical instrument in about 1391 for his ten-year-old son Lewis, who was interested in science and too young to read about it in Latin.

Il Decameron

Francesco Petrarca; ed. by Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo

Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari e Fratelli, 1553
Be [Petrarca] SR

A friend of Boccaccio, the Italian poet and humanist Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) was to become the most popular poet of the English renaissance. His ‘De Obedientia ac Fide Uxoria Mythologia’ (‘A Fable of Wifely Obedience and Faithfulness’), an adaptation of the final tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron, is the source of Chaucer’s ‘Clerks’ Tale’, as Chaucer himself states: ‘therfore Petrak writeth / this storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth’. It was Petrarch who gave the story of the patient Griselda a moral interpretation and who added references to the biblical Book of Job, innovations which Chaucer followed.

An. Manl. Sever. Boethii Consolationis Philosophiae Libri V

Boethius

Leiden: Officina Hackiana, 1671
* Bb [Boethius – De consolatione – Latin]

The Latin philosopher and theological writer Anucius Manlius Severus Boethius (ca. 476-524) wrote De Consolatione Philosophiae in prison in about 524 as a dialogue between himself and Lady Philosophy. It was not only one of the most famous works in the history of mediaeval philosophy, but also the most widely circulated of early mediaeval writings. Boethius’s philosophy pervades Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde and, most famously, in about 1380 Chaucer translated De Consolatione Philosophiae as Boece (see case 2).

Saint Augustine, Of the Citie of God

Saint Augustine

London: G. Eld and M. Flesher, 1620
G8.91 [Augustine] fol. SR

The thought of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354-430), helped to shape the Christian Middle Ages more profoundly than that of any other man, and The City of God (written 413-7 as De Civitate Dei) was his most important work. Chaucer’s many references to the Creation show awareness of principles discussed in The City of God. More specifically, the parson’s argument in ‘The Parson’s Tale’ goes back to Augustine, whom the parson sometimes cites. The narrator of the Legend of Good Women invokes Augustine (‘the grete Austyn’) in compassion for Lucrece.

P. Ovidii Nasonis … Metamorphoses oder Verwandlung

Ovid; trans. by Johan Spreng

Frankfurt: Georg Raben, Sigmund Feyrabend and Weigand Hanen Erben, 1564
Bb [Ovid] SR

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, shown here in a rare sixteenth-century German edition, are a series of tales of transformations which were widely quarried in the later Middle Ages and beyond. Chaucer draws upon Ovid frequently, owing more to him than to any other classical writer. Although Chaucer’s only Ovidian transformation is of a tell-tale bird in ‘The Manciple’s Tale’, Ovid’s influence is apparent in the meditation of the goddess Fama in The House of Fame, the story of Ceyx and Alcione in The Book of the Duchess, the description of Diana’s temple in ‘The Knight’s Tale’, and the stories of Thisby, Hypsipyle, Medea and especially Philomela in The Legend of Good Women.

Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis

Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius

Lyon: S. Gryphius, 1538
Bb [Macrobius] SR

The dream of Scipio is the only part of Cicero’s De Re Publica known in the Middle Ages, and it was known exclusively via the Roman writer and philosopher Macrobius (fl. ca. 400), who reproduced it with a commentary sixteen times longer than the dream itself. Macrobius exercised an important intellectual influence in the Middle Ages and beyond. Chaucer summarises the dream at the opening of his dream vision The Parliament of Fowls and also refers to it in The Romaunt of the Rose, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame and ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’.

Le Roman de la Rose, vol. 2

Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun

Paris: veuve Pissot, 1735
XTJ L85 735

The Roman de la Rose was the most popular and influential secular poem of the later Middle Ages. Begun by Guillaume de Lorris in about 1235-7 and continued by Jean de Meun from about 1275, it tells of a young man in a walled garden falling in love. Chaucer’s most obvious use of it is his fragmentary translation, The Romaunt of the Rose (case 1). But its influence is apparent, too, in several of Chaucer’s other writings, such a the game of chess in The Book of the Duchess, the love vision of The House of Fame, and the prologue of The Legend of Good Women. Within the Canterbury Tales, it is the major source for ‘The Physician’s Tale’, ‘The Monk’s Tale’ and the character of the wife of Bath in her ‘Prologue’.

The Floure and the Leaf, & The Boke of Cupide, God of Love

Ed. by F.S. Ellis

Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896
[S.L.] III [Kelmscott Press - 1896]

An edition of the complete works of Chaucer was the Kelmscott Press’s most famous and spectacular undertaking: a lavishly illustrated and decorated 524-page folio, four years in the making, described as the finest book since Gutenberg’s Bible, and costing £20 for paper copies, £120 for vellum ones. The 47-page Floure and the Leafe was finished on 21 August 1896, fifteen weeks after the Kelmscott Chaucer. It is a much more modest production, with paper copies selling for ten shillings each. The typeface (‘Troy type’) is a larger version of that used for the bulk of the Kelmscott Chaucer, and the same as the one used for the titles of the earlier work’s longer poems. .

The Flower and the Leaf

London: E. Arnold, 1902 (Essex House Press)
[S.L.] III [Essex House Press - 1902]

C.R. Ashbee’s Essex House Press (1898-1910) took over several employees of the Kelmscott Press as well as its two Albion printing presses, and printed books in the same spirit. The Flower and the Leaf is its only ‘Chaucerian’ production. This is one of 165 copies, all printed on vellum, with hand-colouring.

The Canterbury Tales, vol. 1

Geoffrey Chaucer; ill. by Eric Gill

Waltham St Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1929
[S.L.] III [Golden Cockerel Press – 1929]

The Golden Cockerel Canterbury Tales has been described as one of the foremost English illustrated books of the twentieth century. It was published in four volumes between February 1929 and March 1931, with each volume containing the tales for one day of the pilgrimage. The undertaking was massive. Engraver Eric Gill and designer Robert Gibbing began work on it in the summer of 1927, and it occupied much of the Press’s effort and capital until 1931. It used the same design and some of the same borders that it had used for its edition of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in 1927, but had numerous specially designed initial letters. The text is that of Skeat, first published in 1894-7. Shown here is one of fifteen copies printed on vellum. It is open at the end of the Reeve's Tale and the beginning of the Cook's Tale.